Color Grade Photos

Start from a look, shape the tones, then push color where you want it. The preview updates as you move each control, and it all runs on your device, not our servers.

1. 1Add a photo: Drop in a JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF, or choose one from your device.
2. 2Pick a look: Start from one of eleven presets, or leave it at None and build the grade yourself.
3. 3Set the tones: Use exposure and contrast for the whole picture, then lift, gamma and gain for the blacks, the midtones and the whites separately.
4. 4Tint each range: Drag the shadow, midtone and highlight wheels to push color into that range, then set balance and blending to control how far each reaches.
5. 5Fix one color: Open the color mixer and change the hue, saturation or brightness of a single color band without touching the other seven.
6. 6Check the scopes: Switch to Scopes to see the histogram, RGB parade and waveform, and confirm nothing is crushed or blown.
7. 7Save it: Apply the grade and download the photo, or save the grade itself as a .cube LUT to use elsewhere.

A color grade is two jobs at once: deciding how bright each part of the picture is, and deciding what color it leans toward. The three wheels split the brightness range into shadows, midtones and highlights and let you answer both questions for each range on its own — which is what separates grading from simply turning up the saturation.

What each luminance control actually does

• Lift adds an offset that pivots on white, so it raises or crushes the blacks and leaves the whites exactly where they are. This is how you get faded, filmic shadows.
• Gamma applies a power curve that fixes both ends, so only the middle of the range moves. Use it to open up a dull picture without blowing the highlights.
• Gain is a multiply that pivots on black, so it raises or lowers the whites and leaves the blacks alone. This is the control for a bright, punchy finish.
• Balance moves the point where the shadow range hands over to the highlight range, so you can decide what counts as a shadow in this particular photo.
• Blending sets how far each range reaches into the next. Low blending keeps the three tints separate; high blending lets them overlap into a smoother, softer grade.

The three ranges are computed so their weights always add up to exactly one. That sounds like a technicality and is the reason the wheels behave: no range can ever subtract another range's color, so a tint you add to the shadows stays put when you then tint the highlights.

A saturation slider moves every color in the picture. The color mixer splits the spectrum into eight bands — red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple and magenta — and gives each one its own hue, saturation and brightness. Lift the orange band and skin warms up while the sky stays exactly as it was.

• Hue rotates that band toward its neighbours, for turning a yellow-green foliage toward true green, or a magenta sunset toward orange.
• Saturation strengthens or drains that one color. Pulling a single distracting color down is usually a better fix than desaturating the whole frame.
• Luminance brightens or darkens everything of that color. Darkening the blue band is the classic way to deepen a sky without touching the clouds.

Greys, whites and blacks are never touched, however far you push a slider. Anything close to neutral has no meaningful color to shift, and moving it would put a color cast into shadows and concrete — so the mixer fades out as a pixel approaches grey.

Your screen is not a reliable judge of your own photo — it is calibrated differently from everyone else's, and your eye adjusts to whatever you have been staring at. The scopes measure the picture instead of describing it, and all three update as you move a control.

• Histogram counts how much of the photo sits at each brightness level, per channel. A stack piled against either edge is detail you have already lost.
• RGB parade shows the red, green and blue channels side by side across the width of the frame. When one channel's shadows sit higher than the others, that is your color cast, and you can see where it is.
• Waveform plots brightness against horizontal position, so you can see which part of the frame is blown rather than only how much of it is. A bright sky and a bright face look identical in a histogram and completely different here.
• Clipping readout names the exact percentage of the photo that is crushed to black or blown to white, so the decision to pull the highlights back is a number rather than a guess.

A 3D LUT is a look stored as a lookup table — the format colorists, camera operators and video editors pass grades around in. This tool reads them and, unusually for a free browser tool, writes them.

• Load a .cube to put someone else's look on top of your own grade, with a strength slider to dial it back. Files up to 144 points are read; anything above 64 is resampled to what your device can hold, and the tool tells you when that happens.
• Save a .cube to take the grade you just built into a video editor, another photo app, or the next hundred photos in someone else's tool. Choose 33 points for the size everything reads, or 65 for the closest match to the picture on screen.
• Everything is included in the saved file — the wheels, the mixer, levels, the color controls and any LUT you loaded, all baked into one table.

The saved file is produced by the same code that draws the preview, not by an approximation of it, so the look you export is the look you were just looking at.

Grading is what makes a set of photos look like they belong together, and what gives a single photo a mood it did not have straight out of the camera.

• A consistent feed or portfolio Build a look once, save it as a LUT, and apply the same grade to every photo in the shoot. With Pro you can grade the whole set in one pass and download them as a single archive.
• Portraits The orange band in the color mixer is skin. Lifting its brightness and easing its saturation is a gentler correction than anything a global slider can do.
• Product photography Set the black and white points with levels so the background is genuinely white, then use vibrance rather than saturation so the product's color stays accurate.
• Film and cinematic looks Teal shadows and warm highlights is the grade every action film has used for twenty years, and the three wheels are the control that produces it.

A 12-megapixel photo is graded in about 33 milliseconds using your device's graphics hardware, and every control updates the preview as you drag it.

• Photo filters

  Presets, blur, sharpen, grain and vignette.

• Photo enhancer

  One-press correction for exposure and detail.

• Crop image

  Reframe and straighten before you grade.

• Compress JPG

  Bring a large photo under the free size cap.